Associate Director - AI Innovation Lab, Human-centered Design

About this role

Who We Are

At Kyndryl, we run and reimagine the mission-critical technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. We are at the heart of progress; with proven expertise and a continuous flow of AI-powered insight, enabling smarter decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge. For our people-Kyndryls-that means doing purposeful work that powers human progress. Join us and experience a flexible, supportive environment where your well-being is prioritized and your potential can thrive.

The Role

As Associate Director you lead customer innovation engagements end to end - from challenge framing and executive workshops through prototype direction, evidence and the decision that follows. You are the customer's strategic contact throughout and a trusted advisor to their senior leadership, bridging the gap between business problems, research insight and tangible concepts people can test.

This is a design-leadership and consulting role, not an engineering one. Practical AI fluency is essential - a point of view on how AI reshapes what we design, and enough understanding of agentic systems to direct credible prototypes - but you do not need to be the deepest engineer in the room. You are composed in ambiguity, create just enough structure to move fast and help a complementary team do its best work.

What you will own

• The customer journey. Shape the brief, engagement arc and success measures with the customer and account team; connect immersion, co-design, workshops, build, test and post-Lab follow-through.

• Executive momentum. Lead CIOs, CTOs, COOs and their leadership teams through ambiguity, constructive challenge and the decisions required to move.

• The opportunity frame. Translate business priorities, user needs and operational realities into a precise opportunity, a credible value hypothesis and an actionable design challenge.

• The human-AI system. Define what people, agents and systems each know, decide and do - handoffs, exceptions, control and accountability.

• The build and the test. Set fidelity, medium and AI approach; direct creative technologists, designers, researchers and engineers through focused build cycles; define the evidence before the test using research, realistic scenarios, synthetic personas and system evaluation.

• The decision. Connect challenge, evidence and recommendation to an owned next step - sprint, pilot, transformation initiative or deliberate stop.

• What repeats. Turn validated work into reusable methods, patterns, components, prompts, agent states, policies, evaluation sets and reference builds.

• The practice. Build complementary strengths across design, consulting, AI and business strategy rather than one profile; set the quality bar and coach; keep roughly 10 percent of capacity for moonshots in human-AI collaboration, embodied AI and adaptive interfaces.

Scope and partnerships

You own the whole engagement, not every artifact: its intellectual and experiential quality, the senior customer relationship and the path from Lab activity to durable business value.

• You own engagement architecture and outcomes. Customer journey, design direction, prioritization, prototype intent, validation plan, executive decision moments and the post-Lab path.

• The Senior Creative Technologist owns hands-on making. Assigned prototypes, interaction artifacts, technical exploration, testing evidence and implementation-ready handoff, working to direction from you and the Director. On smaller engagements they carry the day-to-day customer relationship within that direction.

• Engineering, account and Lab operations own their domains. Engineering leads own production architecture, security, integration and deployment; you connect business intent and the intended experience to technical delivery. Account, industry and alliance teams bring opportunity context, domain expertise, relationships and commercial follow-through. Scheduling, hospitality, AV, safety and equipment sit with Lab operations.

Success looks like. Engagements end with evidence and an owned executive decision, not just satisfaction; what is built traces to a customer priority and a plausible source of value; validated opportunities move into funded sprints, pilots or programs; patterns and assets compound across Lab teams, industries and customers.

Who You Are

What you bring

Minimum qualifications

• Education. Bachelor's degree in design, HCI, business, engineering, computer science, architecture or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience. 10+ years in design, innovation or consulting, including 3+ years leading multidisciplinary teams and owning senior customer or executive relationships.

• Portfolio. Case studies of engagements you led end to end: the challenge, how you framed it, what was prototyped and tested, and the decision or outcome it produced.

• Language. Business-level fluency in English.

You will thrive here if you have

• Executive presence and facilitation. Confidence leading senior customers through ambiguity, co-design, constructive challenge and consequential decisions.

• Business acumen and consulting judgment. The ability to read enterprise priorities, frame opportunity and connect value, feasibility and a practical route to action - going beyond strategy into live implementation.

• Human-centered design leadership. Significant experience leading service, product, experience or innovation work from research and framing through validation and outcome.

• End-to-end engagement leadership. Experience shaping and running complex customer workshops, Lab engagements or consulting programs, not just facilitating isolated sessions.

• AI opportunity fluency. Enough understanding of generative and agentic systems to spot meaningful possibilities, challenge assumptions and direct credible prototypes.

• Multidisciplinary direction. Experience aligning designers, creative technologists, researchers,…